We've all looked at someone's face and thought: "Now there's someone I can really trust." Or perhaps: "I wouldn't trust him with a wooden nickel." To the surprise of social scientists, children as young as three make the same sort of judgments based on nothing more than facial features. That's what researchers found in a new study published in Psychological Science.

The researchers expected the adults to be pretty much in agreement in picking who was trustworthy, dominant, and competent or not. And they were. The rate of consensus was in the 80 to 95 percent range. But they didn't expect a similar trend among the kids.

"We were dumbstruck when we found very young children have these preferences by age